This study examines the function and significance of houses in children's literature, concentrating on a close reading of a large number of representative texts. The houses that children live in, move to or visit in these novels are especially striking and unforgettable. Throughout the fiction the house is a dominant setting, occupying a prominent place and producing a powerful imaginative impact upon the reader. This book addresses the need for a comprehensive examination of the symbolic and structural patterns of domestic settings in children's literature. It was written especially for those who would like to see children's literature placed in the same context and judged by the same criteria as its adult counterpart.

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.

Introduces you to the promises and problems of Charles Taylor's thought in major contemporary debates

For many of us, our earliest and most meaningful experiences with literature occur through the medium of a translated children’s book. This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated: what contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.

Considering children’s literature as a powerful repository for creating and proliferating cultural and national identities, this monograph is the first academic study of children’s literature in translation from the Western Balkans. Marija Todorova looks at a broad range of children’s literature, from fiction to creative non-fiction and picture books, across five different countries in the Western Balkans, with each chapter including detailed textual and visual analysis through the predominant lens of violence. These chapters raise questions around who initiates and effectuates the selection of children’s literature from the Western Balkans for translation into English, and interrogate the role of different stakeholders, such as translators, publishers and cultural institutions in the representation and construction of these countries in translated children’s literature, both in text and visually. Given the combination of this study’s interdisciplinary nature and Todorova’s detailed analysis, this book will prove to be an essential resource for professional translators, researchers and students in courses in translation studies, children’s literature or area studies, especially that of countries in the Western Balkans. .

This book provides a new critical methodology for the study of landscapes in children's literature. Treating landscape as the integration of unchanging and irreducible physical elements, or topoi, Carroll identifies and analyses four kinds of space — sacred spaces, green spaces, roadways, and lapsed spaces — that are the component elements of the physical environments of canonical British children’s fantasy. Using Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence as the test-case for this methodology, the book traces the development of the physical features and symbolic functions of landscape topoi from their earliest inception in medieval vernacular texts through to contemporary children's literature. The identification and analysis of landscape topoi synthesizes recent theories about interstitial space together with earlier morphological and topoanalytical studies, enabling the study of fictional landscapes in terms of their physical characteristics as well as in terms of their relationship with contemporary texts and historical precedents. Ultimately, by providing topoanalytical studies of other children’s texts, Carroll proposes topoanalysis as a rich critical method for the study and understanding of children’s literature and indicates how the findings of this approach may be expanded upon. In offering both transferable methodologies and detailed case-studies, this book outlines a new approach to literary landscapes as geographical places within socio-historical contexts.

Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin explores the ways in which the figure of the literary orphan can be used to illuminate our understanding of the culture and mores of the long nineteenth century, especially those relating to family and kinship.